encounters with mystery, politics and sex

Response to Interfaith Services of The Low Country

One of the Christian blogs I follow, Interfaith Services of The Low Country, had a recent post on modern Witchcraft. It was very positive and very nice, and basically reproduced the modern Wiccan myth of an ancient and wise Paganism carried forwarded in secret by Pagan Witches bravely facing the persecution of Church and Establishment. So, in an ironic twist I found myself doing a quick comment-response to explain to these good Christian folk the actual roots of Wicca and that it’s not all that wonderfully mythic, really. How weird is that? :) The comment is below. Ta.

Dear Rev. Peter,

thank you for this post, which is very interesting.

I admire the motives and love behind this post, but would like to say a few things. The history of the Craft you are presenting is wonderful and inspiring and moving. It is also mythic, not historical. Not that in any way invalidates the experiences we gain from engaging in this rich mythic history.

I envy your experiences with Starhawk, who is a mythic-poet par excellence and whose works breath the very essence of this inspired myth. The actual history however, I think is more inspiring and I’ll plonk some links that shows this soon.

Some history :) Wicca’s origins are the 1920s-1940s. See Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton. Wicca drew on new ways of seeing Witchcraft, paganism, nature and sexuality and combined these with traditional western magic and lodge work (largely heterodox Christian) to form a new religion, where the boundaries between magic and religion were collapsed into the icon of the Witch. Wicca is most definitely not “Native European Spirituality” in the same way that term is used worldwide.

Early modern witch-hunts did not target Pagan practitioners, as there were few Pagan survivals at all. Nor were the hunts mostly church instigated but secular. Nor did they target wise or cunning folk unduly. The victims of this aspect of our horrible past were mostly women who often owned land and who had no living or no influential male relative. They were mostly ordinary Christian folk and there is little evidence to suggest midwives and women healers were targeted or the hunts were in any way influenced by the nascent medical profession.

We only have to look at this from a commonsense perspective: a rural early modern community would be cutting its own throat by targeting midwives, herbalists and healers, who were core parts of the community. The actual numbers of victims have now been successfully calculated as between 40 000 -100 000 in the early modern period. And indeed, yes these folk were the Anawim.

Witchcraft as a word historically refers exclusively to practitioners of malefic magic. The same concept is found almost universally in each culture. Folklorists and learned academics starting using the term ‘white-witch’ in the modern period, but cunning and wise folk – the rural healers, midwives, magic folk, did not use that term to describe themselves. They often saw themselves as opposed to the mythic evil Witch. Only since Jules Michelet, late 19th century, and later Margaret Murray, did Witchcraft become a positive and self-declared label. Michelet was the forerunner for much of the myth you present here.

The concept of a female form of divinity rose into prominence in England and Europe during the late 19th century in the form of the composite deity, “mother nature”. As you say “Wisdom, you see, is timeless” and modern Wicca was the first popular religion to worship this new form of ancient and timeless female divinity as ‘the Goddess’. Wicca was then, and hopefully is now, riding the wave of cultural and social change, rather than maintaining a literal and historical connection to ancient paganisms.

You write, Witches are “in large part, women dedicated to reclaiming a positive sexual and spiritual identity, people who are committed to ecological awareness and environmental protection, to community outreach and service, and to alternative forms of healing and wholeness that are beyond the usual methods.”

This is indeed true of many modern Witches, but not all, and it certainly is not normative. Many of the founders and original practitioners of Wicca had little feminist or left wing leanings, and were often conservative in politics. Many modern Wiccans have little desire or need for community outreach or service or even charitable donations. Some are still as conservative politically as their spiritual ancestors of the 40s and 50s, and not a few maintain the strict heterosexist component of Wicca where all magic and blessings flow between members of the opposite sex only.

You may be interested in a few blog posts of my own on related topics, which I link below. Thanks again for your inspiring and lovely post :)

9 comments

Ah…never entered me head, :) It is rather muted compared to one bouncing across my frontal lobe recently. When one engages with a broad range of Wiccans, as I have been recently, it is both wonderful and frustrating. Not all have your nuanced and grounded sensibility, Mr Eckstein :)

“Nor were the hunts mostly church instigated but secular. Nor did they target wise or cunning folk unduly. The victims of this aspect of our horrible past were mostly women who often owned land and who had no living or no influential male relative. They were mostly ordinary Christian folk and there is little evidence to suggest midwives and women healers were targeted or the hunts were in any way influenced by the nascent medical profession.

We only have to look at this from a commonsense perspective: a rural early modern community would be cutting its own throat by targeting midwives, herbalists and healers, who were core parts of the community.” I think clearing up these issues is going to be very key for the pagan community in the next 20 years.

Your best source for “The actual numbers of victims” would be especially appreciated as well

What Has Gone Before

What Has Gone BeforeSearch for:

"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured." ~Martin Luther-King.

“A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism” ~

"The pseudo-occultism of the present day, with its dubious psychism, wild theorizing, and evidence that cannot stand up to the most cursory examination, is but the detritus which accumulates around the base of the Mount of Vision. All such worthless rubbish is not worth the power and shot of argument; in order to form a just estimate of the Sacred Science we must study originals, and try to penetrate the minds of the great mystics… whose works bear evidence of first-hand knowledge of the supersensible worlds."Dion Fortune.

How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth?
How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity?
How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?
~ Starhawk

"It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity."
B.K.S. Iyengar

“For most of us, however, we only think seriously of food or sex or money when it becomes a problem, which is to say when we feel we are not getting our share. When we find ourselves in that situation then I regret to say that meditational visualisations are really not the best way to remedy the lack. … We are here in a physical condition in a physical world and while in that state we have to abide by the laws appropriate to it.”
~ Gareth Knight

"The biblical texts have been strained out through a Greek/Latin mindset, which is very surface and static. I sometimes think it would have actually have been better if Western culture had based so called "Western religion" on Greek philosophy, rather than middle-eastern, because then at least you'd have all one thing. It would be eternally consistent. But what we have now is sort of half of each. And you're left with a basically schizophrenic tradition." ~ Neil Douglas-Klotz

"There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too."~ Karen Armstrong.

"if a man like the Dalai Lama, who had lost an entire country and countless friends, could still lose himself in gales of giggles, surely there was hope for the rest of us."~ Rachel Louise Snyder.

"We have to “kill” ourselves, often in the most gruesome manner possible, the become more than the bloke produced by the collision of History, Accident and Genetics on the day we were born."~ Robert Anton Wilson.

"Can a horse tell you what it means to be human? How can a horse get beyond the boundaries of being a horse and say what it means to be human? Why do we think a human being can say what it means to be God? And yet we’ve done that; we’ve done that and we said that we’ve got it so right that if you don’t believe it we’ll burn you at the stake. That’s a very strange idea." ~John Shelby Spong.

How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth?
How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity?
How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?
~ Starhawk

“For most of us, however, we only think seriously of food or sex or money when it becomes a problem, which is to say when we feel we are not getting our share. When we find ourselves in that situation then I regret to say that meditational visualisations are really not the best way to remedy the lack. … We are here in a physical condition in a physical world and while in that state we have to abide by the laws appropriate to it.”
~ Gareth Knight

"It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity."
B.K.S. Iyengar

"The biblical texts have been strained out through a Greek/Latin mindset, which is very surface and static. I sometimes think it would have actually have been better if Western culture had based so called "Western religion" on Greek philosophy, rather than middle-eastern, because then at least you'd have all one thing. It would be eternally consistent. But what we have now is sort of half of each. And you're left with a basically schizophrenic tradition." ~ Neil Douglas-Klotz